Business Intelligence and Analytics

The latest forecast from Gartner, Inc. predicts the Global revenue in the business intelligence (BI) and analytics software market to reach $18.3 billion in 2017, an increase of 7.3 percent from 2016. It further predicts the market to grow to $22.8 billion by the end of 2020.

According to Gartner, modern BI and analytics are growing faster than the overall analytics and BI market, leading to a decline in the traditional BI spending. New BI and analytics platforms have emerged in last few years to meet new organizational requirements for accessibility, agility and deeper analytical insight, shifting the market from IT-led, system-of-record reporting to business-led, agile analytics including self-service.

“Purchasing decisions continue to be influenced heavily by business executives and users who want more agility and the option for small personal and departmental deployments to prove a success,” said Rita Sallam, research vice president at Gartner. “Enterprise-friendly buying models have become more critical to successful deployments.”

Gartner believes that the quickly evolving modern BI and analytics market is being influenced by seven dynamics that are mentioned below:

  1. Modern BI at scale will dominate new buying—Newer and modern BI tools that support greater accessibility, flexibility, agility and analytical insight will dominate new purchases at the enterprise level.
  2. New innovative and established vendors will drive the next wave of market disruption— The emergence of smart data discovery capabilities, machine learning and automation of the entire analytics workflow will drive a new flurry of buying because of its potential value to reduce time to insights from advanced analytics and deliver them to a broader set of people across the enterprise.
  3. Need for complex datasets drives investments in data preparation—The ability to rapidly prepare, clean, enrich and find trusted datasets in a more automated way becomes an important enabler of expanded use.
  4. Extensibility and embeddability will be key drivers of expanded use and value—The ability to embed and extend analytics content will be a key enabler of more pervasive adoption and value from analytics.
  5. Support for real-time events and streaming data will expand use— Organizations will increasingly leverage streaming data generated by devices, sensors, and people to make faster decisions. Vendors need to invest in similar capabilities to offer buyers a single platform that combines real-time events and streaming data with other types of source data.
  6. Interest in cloud deployments will continue to grow— Cloud deployments of BI and analytics platforms have the potential to reduce the cost of ownership and speed time to deployment. That reticence is abating and Gartner expects the majority of new licensing buying likely to be for cloud deployments by 2020.
  7. Marketplaces will create new opportunities for organizations to buy and sell analytic capabilities and speed time to insight — The availability of an active marketplace where buyers and sellers converge to exchange analytic applications, aggregated data sources, custom visualizations and algorithms is likely to generate increased interest in the BI and analytics space and fuel its future growth.

“Organizations will benefit from the many new and innovative vendors continuing to emerge, as well as significant investment in innovation from large vendors and venture capital-funded startups,” said Ms. Sallam. “They do, however, need to be careful to limit their technical debt that can occur when multiple stand-alone solutions that demonstrate business value quickly, turn into production deployments without adequate attention being paid to design, implementation and support.”